Apologies for the repetition, but I’m going to start by restating a slightly updated model of what I think is going on, because it provides the context for the rest of my comment. Basically I still think there are two elements to our disagreement:
The Camp 1 vs Camp 2 disagreement. Camp 1 thinks that a description of the physical system would completely and satisfactorily explain the nature of consciousness and subjective experience; Camp 2 thinks that there is a conceptual element of subjective experience that we don’t currently know how to explain in physical terms, even in principle. Camp 2 thinks there is a capital-H Hard Problem of consciousness, the ‘conceptual mystery’ in Rafael’s post; Camp1 does not. I am in Camp 1, and as best I can tell you are in Camp 2.
You think that all(?) ‘mental states’ pose this conceptual Hard Problem, including intentional phenomena like thoughts and beliefs as well as more ‘purely subjective’ phenomena like experiences. My impression is that this is a mildly unorthodox position within Camp 2, although as I mentioned in my original comment I’ve never really understood e.g. what Nagel was trying to say about the relationship between mental phenomena being only directly accessible to a single mind and them being Hard to explain, so I might be entirely wrong about this. In any case, because I don’t believe that there is a conceptual mystery in the first place, the question of (e.g.) whether the explanandum is an utterance vs a belief means something very different to me than it does to you. When I talk about locating the explanandum at utterances vs beliefs, I’m talking about the scope of the physical system to be explained. When you talk about it, you’re talking about the location(s) of the conceptual mystery.
What you call “model” here would presumably correspond only to the the externally observable neural correlate of a belief, not to the belief. The case would be the same for a neural correlate of an experience, so this doesn’t provide a difference between the two. Explaining the neural correlate is of course just as “easy” as explaining an utterance. The hard problem is to explain actual mental states with their correlates. So the case doesn’t explain the belief/experience in question in terms of this correlate.
As a Camp 1 person, I don’t think that there is any (non-semantic) difference between the observable neurological correlates of a belief or any other mental phenomenon and the phenomenon itself. Once we have a complete physical description of the system, we Camp 1-ites might bicker over exactly which bits of it correspond to ‘experience’ and ‘consciousness’, or perhaps claim that we have reductively dissolved such questions entirely; but we would agree that these are just arguments over definitions rather than pointing to anything actually left unexplained. I don’t think there is a Hard Problem.
It would be unable to distinguish between a p-zombie, which does have the neural correlate but not the belief/experience, and a normal person.
I take Dennett’s view on p-zombies, i.e. they are not conceivable.
So it seems that either the explanation is unsuccessful as given, since it stops at the neural correlate and doesn’t explain the belief or experience, or you assume the explanandum is actually just the neural correlate, not the belief.
In the Camp 1 view, once you’ve explained the neural correlates, there is nothing left to explain; whether or not you have ‘explained the belief’ becomes an argument over definitions.
Apologies for the repetition, but I’m going to start by restating a slightly updated model of what I think is going on, because it provides the context for the rest of my comment. Basically I still think there are two elements to our disagreement:
The Camp 1 vs Camp 2 disagreement. Camp 1 thinks that a description of the physical system would completely and satisfactorily explain the nature of consciousness and subjective experience; Camp 2 thinks that there is a conceptual element of subjective experience that we don’t currently know how to explain in physical terms, even in principle. Camp 2 thinks there is a capital-H Hard Problem of consciousness, the ‘conceptual mystery’ in Rafael’s post; Camp1 does not. I am in Camp 1, and as best I can tell you are in Camp 2.
You think that all(?) ‘mental states’ pose this conceptual Hard Problem, including intentional phenomena like thoughts and beliefs as well as more ‘purely subjective’ phenomena like experiences. My impression is that this is a mildly unorthodox position within Camp 2, although as I mentioned in my original comment I’ve never really understood e.g. what Nagel was trying to say about the relationship between mental phenomena being only directly accessible to a single mind and them being Hard to explain, so I might be entirely wrong about this. In any case, because I don’t believe that there is a conceptual mystery in the first place, the question of (e.g.) whether the explanandum is an utterance vs a belief means something very different to me than it does to you. When I talk about locating the explanandum at utterances vs beliefs, I’m talking about the scope of the physical system to be explained. When you talk about it, you’re talking about the location(s) of the conceptual mystery.
As a Camp 1 person, I don’t think that there is any (non-semantic) difference between the observable neurological correlates of a belief or any other mental phenomenon and the phenomenon itself. Once we have a complete physical description of the system, we Camp 1-ites might bicker over exactly which bits of it correspond to ‘experience’ and ‘consciousness’, or perhaps claim that we have reductively dissolved such questions entirely; but we would agree that these are just arguments over definitions rather than pointing to anything actually left unexplained. I don’t think there is a Hard Problem.
I take Dennett’s view on p-zombies, i.e. they are not conceivable.
In the Camp 1 view, once you’ve explained the neural correlates, there is nothing left to explain; whether or not you have ‘explained the belief’ becomes an argument over definitions.